The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three

by Jonathan Strahan

  Red and blue lines criss-crossed the screen, mapping her data. Bridget recognized none of it. She pulled her hands away from the keyboard and fanned her fingers in front of her eyes. Slowly, she began to feel the ache of her cold, unheated office settle in her fingertips.

  She tried to remember the last time she'd spoken to anyone for more than two sentences. It had been over three weeks. She was twenty-nine years old and she couldn't fathom why she'd ever thought that mapping sunspots was worth the utter lack of human company.

  She fled the office early, ignoring the queries of professors and students as she unlocked her bike from the rack outside the building and rode away down the snowy road. When she reached her house, she found an unfamiliar woman standing there, her outfit and coiffure so immaculate that at first Bridget thought she was selling Avon.

  "I've been sent by a secret admirer," said the woman, introducing herself as Eilethyia.

  Bridget couldn't imagine any student or professor, the only two groups of people she interacted with, hiring this elegant woman to make a suit on their behalf. "Oh, yes?" she asked.

  "Indeed," said Eilethyia, unruffled. "My client prefers to woo via a mediator, someone who understands human culture better than he does."

  "Human culture?" asked Bridget, wondering what prank was being pulled on her. "Tell this admirer, whoever he is, that I don't go on blind dates."

  "It's not a blind date, exactly," said Eilethyia. "You've met before."

  "Who is he?" asked Bridget.

  A sly smile crossed Eilethyia's lips. She turned and pointed toward the summit of the noontime sky where the sun blazed through the cold air, dazzling. Somehow, Bridget was unsurprised.

  "I daresay you're as enamored of him as he is of you," said Eilethyia. "That's probably what he likes about you. Never forget that gods are narcissists. Why do you think we want everyone to worship us?"

  Bridget laughed, not at the fact of her admirer's godhood, for that she had already strangely come to accept. She laughed at the frank and unabashed admission of narcissism. At the time, she thought it was a joke.

  Most gods dabbled with mortals the way most mortals dabbled with self-love. It was entertaining, it was convenient, it was a way of releasing tension when nothing better presented itself. The chief deity himself liked to season his love life by seducing mortal maidens as a white bull or swan. But it was like an hors d'oeuvre to a gourmet meal. Once the champagne framboise and lobster bisque had been sampled, he wasted no time in slipping back into his natural godly form to hightail it home for an entrée of duck Martiniquaise with his lady wife.

  Rarely, a god found mortal love affairs becoming not an aperitif, but something altogether too alluring: a fetish.

  Apollo denied it was that way with him. He remained aloof and rakish, playing up his persona as the literally eternal bachelor. It worked pretty well for him too, Helios noted, as he watched Apollo cozy up with the tow-headed boy he'd lured over from the piano. The boy wrapped his arms around Apollo's waist, aiming a nip at the god's ear.

  Helios set down his pepper vodka. He left a little flame burning on the surface, evaporating the alcohol. Over his shoulder, the cocktail waitress gingerly cleared her throat.

  "Would you mind?"

  Helios looked down at a pudding enflambé. "But of course," he said, winking, but the reflexive flirtation felt false. His overzealous flare singed the eyebrows of a nearby man in tweed. The waitress rushed over to give him a free drink.

  The blond kid slipped his tongue between Apollo's sculpted lips. His giggling drifted on the air with the cigarette smoke. Helios could smell his cologne: sandalwood with a hint of moss. He looked away.

  Helios hadn't been with a goddess since his only son, Phaeton, died. At sixteen, the boy had begged to drive Helios's sun chariot across the sky. Helios pleaded with him to choose any other gift, knowing the boy wouldn't be able to control his team. But Phaeton was sixteen. Failure was something that happened to other people.

  At dawn, Helios helped his son into the chariot, and watched as it rose into the sky until Phaeton was only a golden blur in the heavens. Helios felt a strange stirring as he beheld it. He'd never before seen the sun rise from below. Was this what he looked like to mortals every day? A flare of brilliance so intense it stung the eyes?

  Later, after Phaeton lost control of the team and Zeus brought the boy down with a bolt of lightning so bright it twinned the sun, Helios's daughters wept so fiercely that Zeus changed them into poplar trees. And so Helios lost them, too. Zeus regarded the rivers of their maidenly tears and froze their mourning into amber, which was how that gem first came into the world. The first time Helios slept in Bridget's apartment, he begged her to discard all her amber jewelry. He bought her replacements in jade.

  Helios wasn't sure what it was about mortal women that salved his grief. Or maybe they didn't salve it at all. Maybe their appeal was the way their brief earthbound existences—like plants that flowered out of and then decayed back into the ground—rubbed salt and soil into his wounds.

  Apollo looked over. He and the boy swung their hands together, like children. "Come on, pick someone," said Apollo. "It'll make you feel better."

  "I suppose."

  Helios scanned the bar. His gaze settled on a black woman wearing a gold knit sweater that made her skin glow like a bright penny. She sat with a few girlfriends, chatting. Her laugh sounded like a bell on a winter morning. Helios slipped off his barstool.

  "Might I interrupt?" he asked.

  The woman's friends looked at her to see what she wanted. She gave them a nod. They scooted back their chairs to admit Helios into their circle.

  "I wonder if I might beg the honor of your company tonight," he said. Before the woman could reply, he inspired tiny golden flames to dance across her arms. Sparks pirouetted like ballerinas spinning on a stage.

  Interest sparkled in her mahogany eyes. She wet her lips. Her breathing became shallow and quick. She was dazzled.

  Bridget had never lacked for romantic attention, but she'd never found herself enthralled by it either. Men, by and large, bored her. She wanted men who possessed a flame of dedication that ignited something unique and all-consuming within themselves. She'd dated a few. There was a world champion chess player, a computer programmer who built elaborate palaces of code, and a volcanologist who explored volcanoes on the verge of eruption. But one by one, she'd discovered their passions to be other than what they seemed: rote compulsion, unconscious ability no more personally meaningful than breathing, self-hatred becoming high risk behavior.

  Bridget and Helios had their first date on the rim of a molten lava lake, its active vents guttering threateningly with the burble of tension barely contained. Sulfur permeated the air.

  Eilethyia accompanied them. At first, Bridget chafed at being chauffeured, but when Eilethyia had to talk Helios out of taking Bridget skinny dipping in the lava, Bridget began to understand why the slender goddess had come along.

  They sat and talked about nothing in particular, their worlds so different that the small talk had a dreamlike air, but the strange disjointed nature of their conversation did not detract from the connection they both felt warming between them, as if they spoke different languages but intuitively understood the same words. The goddess Eilethyia sat nearby as they talked, reclining laconically against a slab of basalt, her face turned discreetly away but wearing a rye and pleased smile.

  An hour before dawn broke, as pale light gathered in the sky preparing for the moment when Helios would burst over the horizon in his chariot, Helios took Bridget by the hands and led her onto an obsidian outcropping, outside the goddess's hearing.

  "I can tell you anything you want to know," he said, correctly assuming that Bridget's lust would be inflamed by the promise of knowledge. "What other stars look like, the chemical composition of distant suns, why magnetic fields pulse and sway the way they do. I could take you to visit strange planets and nebulas and pulsars."

  "I don't th
ink I'd survive," said Bridget.

  "Then ask me questions, and I'll bring the answers back to you."

  Bridget smiled. The god stood before her with his shoulders thrown back, his feet planted in a strong, wide stance. His hands were hot, his eyes fierce upon her. He had a presence of being in himself like no one that Bridget had ever met before. Throughout her life, she had always felt herself fuzzy and indeterminate, collecting knowledge against the specter of her death like a squirrel assembling nuts before hibernation. Here was someone who flared, and burned, and was.

  Bridget thought back on that first interlude as she stood in the bathroom of Eilethyia's hotel room, exchanging her improvised drape for one of the goddess's dresses. The dress was loose, grey linen, the only thing in Eilethyia's wardrobe that came close to Bridget's size. Bridget had never been overweight, but the goddess was long and narrow as a stroke of calligraphy.

  "Do you need help?" called Eilethyia through the door.

  Bridget looked up at the blotted tears beneath her eyes that showed in her reflection. She dabbed them quickly away and steeled herself with anger. He burned, but unthinkingly, more like a fire than a man. She had made the right choice.

  Bridget slipped out of the bathroom. The goddess stood nearby, watching.

  "Thanks for letting me borrow this," said Bridget. "I couldn't face going up to the suite for my luggage."

  "Does your family know where you are?" asked Eilethyia.

  "I called my father and told him to go home. I don't want to see him now."

  "There's no other mortal to comfort you? Sisters? Friends?"

  "I'm an only child," said Bridget. "Isolation is an old habit."

  Eilethyia nodded, businesslike but not unkind, diamond studs flashing at her ears. "We should get something to eat."

  Bridget raised her eyebrows. "At this time of night?"

  "I know a good Greek place not far from here."

  Bridget followed Eilethyia though the city's winding intersections. Drunk people swarmed in and out of the pubs lining the river. The air smelled of the contrast between crisp wind and stale beer. They entered an alley and Eilethyia led Bridget up a narrow, metal flight of stairs. Bridget winced as the goddess knocked on someone's door.

  "It's so late," Bridget began.

  Eilethyia raised a silencing hand. Bridget held her tongue.

  Soon enough, a heavyset woman in a long white nightdress opened the door. A man dressed in slacks and a cotton undershirt stood behind her, sleepless circles beneath his eyes. Both looked unsurprised by the intrusion. "Come upstairs," said the woman, her voice flat.

  "What did you do to them?" Bridget whispered to the goddess as they were escorted through a narrow, tiled parlor.

  "Nothing," said Eilethyia.

  She gestured down a shadowed hallway. Bridget saw the small white shapes of pajama-clad children peering around the corner.

  "They know me here," said the goddess.

  The woman led them up another flight of stairs. They came out in a roof garden where several ironwork tables sat among potted ferns. The man started to hand them menus, but Eilethyia waved him away and ordered for them both. The man bowed his head and retreated.

  Eilethyia leaned back in her chair. "So, what do you plan to do now?"

  "I don't know," Bridget admitted. "I can't continue with my thesis . . . spending so much time with him every day would be . . . maybe I'll go to work in a lab for a while . . . "

  "I meant in regard to your erstwhile fiancé."

  Bridget sighed. "It's not like I can avoid seeing him." She glanced up at the sky where a sliver of moon sliced the dark. "At least we won't have to talk."

  "Will you want another god to replace him?"

  "Absolutely not!"

  Bridget surprised herself with her vehemence. She shifted in her seat, smoothing wrinkles out of the linen dress.

  "Looking back, there was always something . . . strange about our relationship. The way he saw me was . . . "

  "Like an old man looking at a young girl?" offered Eilethyia.

  "Sort of . . . "

  "A celebrity admiring his most ardent fan?"

  "Something like that."

  Eilethyia gave a short sharp nod. "It's always been my theory that gods who fixate on mortals are . . . What's the word I'm looking for?" She tapped one crimson nail against the table. "Unnatural, perhaps? Not that there's anything wrong with unnatural. Natural childbirth is painful and often fatal. Unnatural can be good."

  "Unnatural?" repeated Bridget, skeptically.

  "How do I put this? They're like humans who want to make love with beasts."

  Bridget flinched sharply.

  "Don't take it like that. It's a difference in kind, not scale."

  The man arrived with their food, a plate full of meat wrapped in grape leaves for the goddess, and squares of lamb on rice for Bridget.

  "You could have told me all this before you matched me with Helios," said Bridget, accusingly. "Why did you let me get engaged to someone you thought was mentally diseased?"

  "Ah. Well." Delicately, Eilethyia chewed a leaf from the side of her fork. "I haven't told you what I think is wrong with mortals who want to be with gods."

  Bridget pricked with shame. She hated the thought of others seeing wrongness in her. She worked hard to conceal her flaws.

  Eilethyia sipped her wine calmly. "Mortals and gods are always seeing in each other what they themselves lack. Divinity, mundanity, exaltation, pain." She set down her glass and fixed Bridget with a frank stare. "If you want my advice, you have two options. Take my card, and when you've had time to recover, I'll pair you with another god. Or, if you want to grow, if you want to become a better, more whole person, then find the spark of divinity within yourself and search for a mortal to share it with."

  Goosebumps prickled along Bridget's arms. She felt bruised and earthen and drained. "It's all so easy for you, isn't it? You don't have relations with gods or mortals, do you?"

  "No," said Eilethyia.

  The goddess glanced over toward a corner of the roof where children's toys lay scattered among the potted plants.

  "I'm too familiar with where it all leads," she said, and Bridget saw her smile was sad.

  Helios escorted the woman, whose name turned out to be Jody, to a nocturnal street fair sprawling in the city's main square. Her friends tagged along. He entertained them by challenging the fire eater to a contest which ended when Helios devoured a flaming meteor and then sent it rocketing back into space.

  Helios selected a mortal man for each of Jody's friends, haloing them with a light touch of flame to make them seem more attractive. One by one, her friends peeled away. Soon Helios and Jody were alone.

  "Would you join me in my hotel room?" he asked.

  By the time they reached the elevator, Jody's hands were all over him, stroking his hips, unbuttoning his shirt. Her breath on his neck felt damp and hot as a humid afternoon.

  When the elevator clanged Helios's floor, they backed out, entwined, stumbling through the corridor. Helios unclasped Jody's bra. She unzipped his fly. He had to clasp her hands to hold them still long enough so that he could work the key that admitted them into the honeymoon suite.

  When they got inside, they found themselves looking at the tow-headed boy from the bar. He sat astride Apollo in the gigantic bathtub. Sprays of bubbles from the jets obscured what was going on beneath the water.

  "What is he doing here?" demanded the boy. "Isn't this your room?"

  "My friend here just got left at the altar," said Apollo. "I didn't think he'd be needing the room."

  Helios turned to Jody. "My apologies."

  "I don't mind," said Jody. She traced her finger down Helios's chest. "It's actually kind of a turn-on."

  Leaving Apollo and his mortal in the bathroom, Helios and Jody moved to the bed. Jody's skin felt smooth and sweet as flower petals. Her close-cropped natural hair covered her head like delicious brown moss. Helios ran his fingers through i
t over and over, the sensation delectable and maddening. He pulled the black strap of her bra out from her sleeve, removing the whole lacy garment without taking off her sweater. He slipped his hands beneath the cashmere and took her breasts into his palms. Her hard nipples felt like knots on wood, beautifully textured. Gently, Helios eased her sweater over her head. A gold chain flashed around her neck.

  Helios caught the pendant in his palm. "What is this?"

  "Alaskan amber," said Jody. "There's part of a bee in it."

  Helios examined the gem. It was set in a simple silver oval. Rich, warm colors swirled through its heart: drifts of sienna, umber, burnt orange, and carmine suspended like haze in a yellow sky. A bee hung in its center, wings trapped mid-flutter. Helios thought of all the grief that had been poured into making this chaotic, vibrant thing, all the sorrow his daughters wept out when Phaeton's chariot fell. Their solidified grief was incandescent as the sun. It burned him.

  Helios released the necklace. It swung down, a yellow globe between Jody's breasts. She cocked her head and smiled, raising her eyebrows in invitation. Her lips sparkled. Helios moved away from the bed, and began dressing.

  "What?" asked Jody. "Do bees gross you out or something?"

  Helios's fingers felt numb on his shirt buttons. "I'm sorry. As my friend said, I was left at the altar today."

  She hesitated, and then said, "That must be rough."

  "As you can imagine, I'm still in a state of shock. I hope you'll forgive me."

  "It's okay," she said. She pulled herself into a sitting position, legs tucked beneath her, and began putting on her clothes. "I can meet up with my friends tomorrow."

  She tugged on her sweater and pulled a compact out of her purse, checking to make sure her lipstick hadn't smudged from kissing. She gave Helios a sad smile, one side of her mouth pulled up into a dimple.

  "Try not to take it too hard, okay?" she said. "A man like you, someone else'll snap you up in no time."